How the Gujarati books of RF Sethna fed India’s appetite for books about Japan in the early 1900s
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In his 1936 autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru, the future prime minister of India, reccalls being deeply affected in his teenage years by the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-’05. “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm and I waited eagerly for the papers for fresh news daily,” recounts Nehru, who 14 at the time. “I invested in a large number of books on Japan and tried to read some of them.”
It was the first time that the country of Japan had caught the attention of the Indian public. Japan had emerged from over two centuries of self-imposed isolation in the 1850s. Though trade between the two countries commenced soon thereafter, very few people in India knew anything about Japan, its society and its culture at the start of the twentieth century.
While Nehru could easily find books in English written by European and American authors, most Indians struggled to find books in their own languages. At a time when the printed word was the only source of information, the few books and articles on Japan that had been published in the nineteenth century seemed inadequate and out of date.
Publishers of books in Indian languages did not take long to cater to this unmet demand. In 1903, even before...